April 18, 2018 On Music It’s Strange the Way the Lord Does Move By Drew Bratcher The other night, up late again listening to old records, I came across a song by the country singer Lefty Frizzell that, so far as I know, I had never heard before. It was the title that got my attention: “There’s No Food in This House.” I imagined Lefty, in his most vexed falsetto, leveling the words at a cheating lover who, in a final act of defiance, blows the week’s grocery money on a trip to the salon. He had other songs to this effect: “You’re Humbuggin’ Me,” “Always Late (With Your Kisses),” “Run ’Em Off,” “You Want Everything But Me.” Merle Haggard called Lefty “the most unique thing to ever happen to country music.” He was, among other things, a kind of hillbilly Falstaff, Nashville’s great minstrel of aggrieved accusations. Lefty was a leading figure in the country movement called honky-tonk, which adapted the genre—previously the province of barn dances, bandstands, and festivals—to the beer hall. Rock ’n’ roll was an influence. Hollywood was too. Lefty’s publicity photos for Columbia Records in the early fifties channel black-and-white film stills. In a classic shot from 1951, he wears a fringed western shirt and a bandanna scarf, looking like Edward G. Robinson doing his best Davy Crockett. Honky-tonk music could, at times, be scandalous. Heavy drinking and infidelity were recurring themes. Webb Pierce, one of Lefty’s contemporaries, had big hits with “There Stands the Glass” and “Back Street Affair,” the former an ode to the cathartic powers of whiskey, the latter a sentimental defense of sleeping around that led Kitty Wells, the queen of country music, to answer with a song of her own. “You didn’t count the cost,” she sang in “Paying for That Back Street Affair.” “You gambled and I lost / Now I must pay with hours of deep despair.” Read More
April 18, 2018 At Work The Tragedy of Going Back: An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri By Dan Piepenbring In 2012, having published four books and won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome. There, she experienced what she described as “a radical transition, a state of complete bewilderment.” A set of preconceptions had hardened around her writing, and in Italy, Lahiri hoped to jettison these in pursuit of a new vulnerability. She looked to the Italian language to reinvent herself on the page, restoring the joy and freedom in her work. One consequence of this immersion was In Other Words, Lahiri’s memoir about language, and her first book written in Italian. (An English translation by Ann Goldstein appeared in 2015.) Just as important, in their way, were her first efforts at translation—a pair of novels, Ties and Trick, by her friend Domenico Starnone, the author of more than a dozen books and a winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. Ties, published last year, tells the story of a marriage in extremis and dissects a lifetime of accrued routine, deception, and petty resentment. When it came to light that Starnone is married to the writer who goes by Elena Ferrante, critics returned to Ties, suddenly eager to read it as a counterpart to Ferrante’s own Days of Abandonment. Trick, Lahiri’s second Starnone translation, out in March, is another vivisection of family life, a novel as lean and unflinching as its predecessor. An elderly illustrator, Daniele, visits his childhood apartment, now his daughter’s home, to babysit his four-year-old grandson. The boy’s frenetic energy fills Daniele with foreboding, forcing him to reckon with his past and his senescence—to accept that his creative powers are waning and his body is failing him. In a pair of phone conversations—one last year, after Ties came out, and one more recently, following the publication of Trick—I talked to Lahiri about the raw power behind Starnone’s work; about her approach to translation and her love of the Italian language; and about balconies, which are scary. Read More
April 18, 2018 On Poetry “First of All I’m Naked”: On the Collected Poems of Michael Lally By Eileen Myles Michael Lally reading at Folio Books in Washington, D.C., c. 1977, with Doug Lang and Terence Winch. Michael Lally’s Another Way to Play, out next week, is an awesome book and you should read every word of it. You won’t do it in a day or in many days, but during the passage of reading it you will learn something about time. Another Way to Play seems to offer advice—and it’s advice from self to self, which might be the only way to enact advice truly. Plus, who is that “another”? Somebody else? As I’m climbing over the rocks, the poems of Michael Lally, this incomplete utopia, a rugged landscape of a book, it occurs to me that what Michael takes on is nothing less than the feat of being alive and the exploding and strewn nature of that exactly on its own terms (living in a body) while this writer keeps trotting out his own arrogance like a family joke, and deep humility is in there, too, humility is the gas station of so much of what Michael Lally does and is, poet and man. Lally is mostly a straight guy, but you may viscerally experience the embrace of another man in “Watching You Walk Away,” which was dedicated to Gregory Millard, one man who died collectively—of AIDS, so there’s an imputation here—of being a survivor of love, even being a man of a certain age or moment who knows that being a loving man and loving men now has both its glory and its price: The world is all around us, even at night, in bed in each others arms distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay down in the dark to pick up in the morning I like your brown eyes when you talk This collected poems or collected poem is constructed of similar yet all different mostly brave moments. It’s a compendium of what one is possibly brave enough to do—to labor, to fail, to lounge, to love. Lally’s not fessing up, but he’s proud. This is undoubtedly the book of a proud man. Proud to a fault, and he’s the first to tell you that as well. I mentioned family before. Yet what one more likely feels throughout the four-hundred-odd pages of Another Way to Play is that you’re kind of in a relationship with this guy. Whether you’re male or female. Which is kind of octopussy, but stylistically Lally is a dancer, habitually reeling from form to form. It’s a broken book in the best sense. There’s no whole here, the self is never resolved, but what’s delivered, weltered in poem form, is a novelistic series of impressions. It’s a real thing and a changing thing. An aesthetic and a biographical one. Years ago I read in James Schuyler’s “Morning of the Poem” that Schuyler approved of Michael Lally because he looked you straight in the eye. Here we’ve got an extended Lally poem (“The Jimmy Schuyler Sonnets”) that tells us much the same thing—that “Jimmy knew what mattered.” The men’s mutual admiration, their like for one another has a special feeling, a leveling affect. They invite us into their intimacy. Their public “like.” Which makes me want to step out too and acknowledge that I’m discovering that I’m extremely influenced by Michael Lally and I hadn’t thought so much about that until I was dwelling in Another Way to Play. Because his affect occurs through so many different gestures. In the most existential way, his poem is an act. Read More
April 17, 2018 Redux Redux: The Taxman Cometh By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Today is tax day, but right now it’s time to put aside your W-2s, forget about your adjusted gross income, and take a break with The Paris Review. This week, we bring you Derek Walcott’s Art of Poetry interview, in which he argues for state support of artists; Richard Stern’s “Audit,” a revenge tale featuring a lisping IRS agent; and Frederick Seidel’s aptly named poem “Widening Income Inequality.” Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37 Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986) I’m fifty-five now and all my life I’ve tried to fight and write and jeer and encourage the idea that the state owes its artists a lot. When I was young it looked like a romance; now that I’m older and I pay taxes, it is a fact. But not only do I want roads, I want pleasure, I want art. Read More
April 17, 2018 Out of Print Schlemihls and Water Sprites By C. D. Rose We’re all probably familiar with Muggles and mugwumps, and happy to point out a Catch-22, knowing very well which books these come from. We’ll casually talk of utopia or pandemonium or describe something as gargantuan while only distantly remembering that More, Milton, and Rabelais coined the terms. The geekier among us will never miss a chance to point out that robot and cyberspace were the inventions of science-fiction writers. Chortle has passed so easily into English that not many know it was actually one of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteaus (and yes, Carroll invented portmanteau as well). And that’s not even getting on to Shakespeare’s legendary level of coinage. Writers’ imaginary words slip easily into reality. I first came across the word schlemihl on the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s V: “In which Benny Profane, a schlemihl and human yo-yo, gets to an apocheir.” While I’m still not quite sure what an “apocheir” is, “schlemihl” seemed perfectly clear—at the time I read V, the concept of the slacker was much in vogue, and one with which I readily identified. While I didn’t for a minute think that Pynchon had coined the word, (correctly) assuming it to be one of the many Yiddish words that have made it into common U.S. usage, schlemihl probably moved from an oral culture into a wider written one due to a once hugely popular book, now almost entirely forgotten. Perhaps the verbally voracious Pynchon had read it. Read More
April 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Age of Wreckers and Exterminators By Andrea Barnet Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson. It was midnight when the lone auburn-haired woman arrived on the beach. Tall and stooped, just shy of fifty-five, Rachel Carson looked considerably older than her years. She swayed a moment as she sat, drank in the briny air. To feel the full wildness, she switched off her flashlight. Then, adjusting her eyes to the darkness, she turned her attention to the swell and roar of the sea. Tonight it was full of “diamonds and emeralds,” flecks of phosphorescence that wave after wave hurled onto the sand. The individual sparks were huge. She could see them “glowing in the sand, or sometimes, caught in the in-and-out play of water,” sluicing back and forth. This is what Carson lived for: bearing witness to the natural world in all its mystery, attuning herself to the earth’s rhythms and eternal cycles, feeling a part of the vast stream of time. It was why she’d spent the last four difficult years pushing so hard to complete Silent Spring. For all her travails, she had known from the moment she’d first read the field studies on the dangers of the synthetic pesticide DDT that she would feel “no future peace” until she shared with the world the gravity of what she saw. She had written the book because she wanted to change things, to alter the way people treated the natural world, to stop the mindless poisoning of it. Though Carson knew she had little time left to live, sitting on this beach tonight she had no regrets. She was filled with a sense that it had all been worth it: the years of isolation; the painstaking work; even her battle, now lost, against the cancer. The public’s reception of the excerpts appearing all summer in The New Yorker had been immediate and enthusiastic—greater, even, than she had dared dream. Especially cheering had been E. B. White’s kind note, commending her for—by now she had memorized the words—“the courage you showed in putting on the gloves and going in with this formidable opponent, and for your skill and thoroughness.” Silent Spring would be “an Uncle Tom’s Cabin of a book,” he predicted, “the sort that will help turn the tide.” Perhaps she could relax now. Finally, people were beginning to ask questions. They no longer “assumed that someone was looking after things,” that the mass aerial spraying of DDT “must be all right, or it wouldn’t be done.” They were beginning to understand that once these pesticides entered the biosphere, they carried the same hazards as nuclear fallout, the same capacity to alter our genetic makeup in grave and irreversible ways; these chemicals not only killed bugs but also migrated up the food chain to poison birds and fish and eventually sicken humans. Read More